You must understand the “voice of the customer” with regard to all of these as well as listen for the voices of non-customers who are looking for similar values. However, as I discuss in the next chapter, your design team must go well beyond just listening to what your customer is saying today. It must also anticipate what the customer will be seeking in the future.

Each of these Customer Primary Values will carry a different weight in your design equation, depending on the nature of the product challenge at hand. No two design challenges will ever have the same Ility values as objectives because every design challenge is unique unto itself.

Here are the eight Primary Customer Values:

Primary Customer
Values Customer Questions
Peformability: Will the product perform as I expect it to?
Affordability: Will it be within my cost expectations?
Featureability: Will it provide added benefits?
Deliverability: Will it be ready for me when I want it?
Useability: Can I quickly and easily install it and learn to use it?
Maintainability: How easy will it be for me to keep in service?
Durability: Is it robust enough to withstand abuse?
Imageability: Will it convey an image of quality and prestige?

A key point is that lean design is far more than just eliminating factory floor waste. It is eliminating waste for your customer and suppliers as well. And very importantly, it’s all about creating value for both your customer and company.

A Closer Look at “Lean Product Design”
As I’ve discussed above, by lean I mean a product or a product development process that delivers value with less waste. Value means benefits for the customer, your company, your supply chain and any other stakeholders who are affected by the creation or use of the product. What I don’t mean is just lean manufacturing value. A lean product must deliver value well beyond your factory floor.

By product I mean the sum of all the elements a product requires over the span of its lifecycle. This includes a product’s functions, parts, lifecycle processes, material, and human labor. I use the word “product” in this book to refer to not only the physical parts of the product, but all the tasks required to design, manufacture, sell, service and dispose of it.

By lifecycle I mean a product’s existence from creation to disposal, from “lust to dust.” I originally used the words “cradle to the grave” to describe what I meant by lifecycle, until a product team member corrected me. He pointed out that some of the most disastrous mistakes are made in the “product lust” phase and some of the most expensive costs occur in the “disposal” phase. In fact, the disposal phase of a product is gathering a lot of attention these days.

Architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart developed such an approach with their design idea called “cradle-to-cradle.” (See their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things)

Herman Miller, Inc., a leading office chair manufacturer, has also taken up the cause of “cradle-to-cradle.” It is now offering a new chair with materials that can be disassembled, and ninety-six percent of these materials can be reused and recycled.

By design I mean the tasks done and actions taken to develop the physical product. I also mean the organizational processes used to support that physical design effort. This now means the involvement of
virtually every department in a company. Product design is now everybody’s job.

Lean Design: How you design your product will drive more than 75% of success. Both the process and the product that results from it must deliver greater value with less waste than conventional product efforts.

Lean Manufacturing: – Lean Manufacturing is a unified, comprehensive set of philosophies, rules, guidelines, tools, and techniques for improving and optimizing discrete processes.

Savings from lean manufacturing efforts can be measured easily. But this is far from the case with the foretasted savings from lean product design: While cost reductions in direct material and direct labor can be predicted, reductions in indirect “overhead” costs are almost impossible to estimate with any accuracy. And savings in customer indirect costs are even more challenging to forecast.

The following are some other differences between Lean Design and Lean Manufacturing:

Side 6 of the CUBE will be used through out the process of innovation.

Spider charts can be created to compare different stakeholder’s evaluations allowing the project team to discuss and reach a consensus on how the current baseline or new solution really rates.

By involving all stakeholders from the start, the team will surface wastes like features of a product that the customer really could care less about or why a design that was rated so well by R&D is disliked by operations.

By comparing the evaluations of many new solution sets teams can quickly compare different solutions and find that next great innovation that will separate your organization from the rest.

Side 5 of the CUBE will be used to break down the ideas created on side 4 even further. Using a matrix of questions the ideas will be broken into pieces using eight tactics against 5 targets. By using this matrix, stakeholders will be able to surface new ideas quickly and find areas that have not been examined. Side 5 will also help your team focus on a particular value or waste that needs improvement.

With the use of the Digital CUBE, stakeholders can search the knowledge base of existing project ideas for use in the current project. The use of a new material or process developed for another product in your organization might be able to be adapted to your current project. When reviewing the questions on side 5′s matrix along with ideas of other stakeholders, new ideas will be sparked increasing the possibility of finding that next great solution.

The ideas generated on side 5 can then be reassembled in a number of different combinations to create new solution sets. These new solution sets will be evaluated using Sides 2 and 3 of the CUBE allowing the project team to quickly determine if the new solution will improve the product, process, or service.

By using sides 4 and 5 of the CUBE, project teams are documenting the scope of their innovation efforts. When asked by senior management, project leaders can quickly show what ideas were looked at and why a particular solution was chosen over the others.

On CUBE side 4 stakeholders will look for insight into new ideas. Using a matrix of questions, each stake holder will examine hindsight, foresight, and outsight.

Hindsight asks the stakeholder to look at his or her past experiences for new ideas. These might be ideas that were used on other projects during the stakeholder’s past job experience.

Foresight asks the stakeholder to use his experiences to find the new ideas for the future. An example might be the use of a new material that is now available in place of an existing one.

Outsight, the most important part of insight, is the use of ideas from outside the stakeholders knowledge and experience. To find outsight, the stakeholder must examine other domains for ideas, similarities, and analogies that relate to or can be applied to the current project. A simple example of this might be to look at nature and a birds ability to perch on a phone wire while in a relaxed state. Can a gripping mechanism be created that mimics this ability in your project.

Each stakeholder will be be asked to break these new ideas down into one of five components or targets. Later on side 5 of the CUBE these broken down components can be reassembled in new ways to create new solution sets.

Focuses innovation goals
Clarifies boundaries & hurdles
Identifies all domain stakeholders
Predicts forces that will impact the innovation
(marketplace, technology & competitive environment)

Too many times project teams spend valuable man hours developing a solution that they later find is wasteful or even undoable for different areas of the business. A design team, for instance, will develop a component that manufacturing currently does not have the man power, experience, or equipment to produce. Situations like this cause unnecessary waste inside your company by causing constant “Fire Fighting” to fix the issues.

Side 1 of the CUBE will systematically get all stakeholders from each domain of your organization involved in the project from the beginning. This will allow all stakeholders of the project to be heard and make their voice a part of the solution and not part of the problem later. The CUBE will get each stakeholder agreeing and focusing on a common goal from the start.

The CUBE will get each stakeholder involved in identifying the forces of change that will affect the project in the future. Changes in the market, available technologies, and your competition can act as a very disruptive force against the life cycle of your product, process, or service. Identifying these forces of change from the beginning will ensure your product can adapt quickly or, even better, not need to adapt at all.

Stakeholders will identify and agree on the boundaries of the project from the start. This will prevent waste by keeping the team focused on innovations that are within the scope of the accepted boundaries set by the organization.

Side 1 of the CUBE will also get input from each stakeholder as to problems or hurdles that they may run into. In the example above, a manufacturing floor lacking experience to produce a new product can begin to train personnel immediately. Stakeholders will use Side 1 to identify preset boundaries which are truly only hurdles and can begin working on ways to get around those hurdles.

By accomplishing all of the steps on side 1 of the CUBE, your project team will have systematically involved all of the stakeholders required to practice “fire prevention” instead of “fire fighting”, keeping each stakeholder focused on a common goal while being made aware of the disruptive forces the team will face.

Opportunities seldom appear in the directions of the past. In the next section of this book I will show you how to exploit the Three Sharks of Perpetual Change, those forces that always assure you new opportunities. They are Three Sharks are the (1) Changing marketplace, (2) New technology, and (3) Your relentless competition. At the end of this Chapter you will find a tool, as at the end of each of these Chapters, for harnessing these Three Sharks in your quest for recognizing ripening opportunity.

Rule of Green Bananas
Just because your new idea is possible doesn’t mean it is practical. And just because it is practical doesn’t mean people will immediately adopt it. There is a time and place for everything.

Every new innovation is tested by this rule. Green bananas are opportunities that the marketplace does not even know they will want. They are ahead of their time. Green bananas are ideas and solutions that people can’t quite yet digest.

Remember from the Introduction to this book that a successful innovation comes when you use your skill of Insight to find and connects a real Want with a real Thing. Just having the Insight to create a new Thing, or technology, is only part of the equation. You must have a real Want, that is ripe to accept it.

Think of this ripeness as being a “gap” in the mind of your consumer. It may be latent or just emerging. But, without such a gap, your new idea as little chance of success. You are trying to put a square peg into a non-existent hole. You have a green banana.

Green bananas try to force their way into our minds when we are not quite ready to accept them. Take the example of micro wave cooking. This technology was well developed by the late 1950s. But homemakers were not ready to accept the radical idea of bombarding food with World War II radar technology.

Only when homemakers began to see microwave cooking not as a technology, but as a way to reduce time in the kitchen to a few minutes did the microwave oven market begin to accelerate. This acceleration enabled low cost production, which in turn drove down costs to make micro wave ovens a part of everyone’s kitchen.

This same story is true of early television, personal computers and a myriad of other innovations. Green banana innovations are solving Wants that have yet to mature.

Some innovations are so green and seem so far ahead of their time that even their contemporaries are unable to understand them. Consider the case of Leonardo Da Vinci. We stand in amazement of Da Vinci’s ability to sketch helicopters, submarines and parachutes. Yet there wasn’t even the hint at his time that there was a Want for these ideas. What’s worse, the Things, or technologies, for converting his ideas to reality would only come after hundreds of years.

Trying to digest a green banana too long before it is ripe can create a bad case of corporate innovation digestion. Cultivate them, care for them but don’t harvest them until the time is ripe.

Avoid Brown Bananas
Brown bananas are at the opposite end of the ripening scale. Brown bananas are ideas trying to squeeze themselves into an already crowded market space. Their chances for success are slim. Their time is past. Many of these ideas just rot on the vine.

Take mousetraps for example. Who can’t forget the old adage, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door!” Nothing could be further from the truth. Creating new products for market needs already being met seldom pays. The U.S. Patent office has issued more than 2,400 patents for mousetraps.

Only a few mousetraps have ever made money. And still dominating the market is the Victor mousetrap, the venerable spring trap wooden device with the big red “V” on it invented in 1898. The Victor sells for about 50 cents. It is reported to dominate the mousetrap market with more than a 90% share. Most seem satisfied with its performance. However that doesn’t stop new inventors.

The moral of this story is to remember that “Perfection seldom pays when “good enough” will do.” Your innovation is worthless if it does not deliver an unmet Want. And it is wasteful if it exceeds what the market wants.

Ripe Yellow Bananas
Ripe yellow bananas are the ideas that are ready to market Want. These new ideas don’t even need to use a new, untried technology. And they can simply be filling an undetected Want.

All bananas in a bunch do not ripen at the same time. Technology does not develop in a straight line. Innovations happen in jerks, stops & starts. Things and Wants must both be mature, or near to maturity.

Bananas ripen faster these days. For centuries, inventions have typically taken twenty to thirty years to go from the first patent or prototype to a widely used product. It took the bar code (UPC) twenty years before it was finally adopted in 1973. The microwave was developed for cooking shortly after WWII but it took another twenty years before consumers begin to buy it in 1967.

The opposite is the story of YouTube, Time Magazine’s Invention of the Year. More than 70,000 home videos are now uploaded to YouTube every day by people all over the world. The idea of YouTube was a perfectly ripe banana. This phenomenal website went from an idea hatched by three twenty-something guys at a Silicon Valley dinner party to become immediate market place hit. Why so?

Time says the founders “stumbled” onto the intersection of three revolutions. I like to say they struck their gold at the Sweet Spot of Wants, Things and Insight.

The Want is our desire to create and share information together, much like MySpace and Wikipedia. Many consumers are impatient with mainstream media.

The Things is the revolution in cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Video production is now so simple and costs so little that it’s within the reach of the mass market.

The YouTube guys had the Insight to connect a Wants with a Thing to reap a $1.6 billion dollar sellout to Google less than year after its launch. That’s a lot of bananas. YouTube had very low barriers standing in the way of its use. Its time was truly ripe.

Your challenge as a corporate innovation leader as I write this book is much like a green banana, perhaps only tinged with a few flecks of yellow. The idea of innovation as a systematic, organized, measurable corporate process that can be quickly applied to any product, service or business process is only beginning to ripen. Most corporate innovation initiatives are piecemeal collections of idea collection, portfolio management, techniques for “open source innovation” and other high level tactics.

Your task is to take innovation to the core of your business. To make it a management process that is doable, repeatable and sustainable.

So how do you recognize ripening bananas on your path to Systematic Corporate Innovation? The following “Rule of the Three Sharks” helps you do just that.

Modular outsourcing is catching fire these days.

Industries such as automotive, computer and even shipbuilders are rapidly moving to outsourcing the design and build entire subsystems, or modules.

They are finding that building a complex product from smaller sub-systems that can be designed independently, yet function together as a whole, can bring faster innovation, lower cost and even better quality.

Case in point: The computer I am writing this article on is a modular Dell laptop.  Virtually every major component, from hard drive to snap-in battery, is modular.  I benefit by being able to configure my laptop the way that suits me best.

Should I need service, I simple call in for the new “plug-and-play” component and FedEx delivers it the next day with my old component going back in the same carton.

Dell leaves the task of inventory to their modular component manufacturer, sparing themselves storage costs and obsolete shelf goods.  Most importantly, the technology innovation responsibility rests squarely with the supplier.  This leaves Dell to focus on what they do best: creating the overall systems architecture and developing the market for their products.

In a few short years, virtually all computer manufacturers, including Compaq and Microsoft, have switched to the same product strategy.  At Microsoft, where we with their Hardware Division, they have even coined a new word for this product strategy.  Microsoft calls it legoability.

High volume manufacturers, such as the auto industry, have long manufactured components for modular production.  Modular components are easier to automatically assemble, require less storage protection and space, and are simpler to service.

What is now different is that all the tasks of technology development, detail design as well as manufacture and inventory is being turned over to supplier partner.

For example, after over 15 years of studies, experiments and false starts, the U.S. auto industry is rapidly moving into modular outsourcing.

Entire car interiors are now being outsourced, as well as all design responsibility, to First Tier suppliers.  These same suppliers are now scrambling to buy up lower level suppliers and even Detroit-area design shops to make sure they have the capability to tackle the complexity of such modular design and build.

Even slow-to-change industries are going modular.  Newport News Shipbuilding, builder of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and America’s largest shipyard, is studying the possibility of outsourcing the mammoth control tower on its new fleet of  21^st century aircraft carriers.

Many components on the Navy’s new attack submarine, being designed and built jointly by Newport News and the General Dynamic’s Electric Boat Division, are also done using modular design and build.

If modular outsourcing is so great for computer manufacturers, why aren’t more companies getting on the bandwagon?  Why has it taken the auto industry over 15 years to really have confidence in the concept?

The fact is that computers are not cars.  Designing products for modular outsourcing takes experience.

Learning cycles in the computer industry are measured in months.  In the auto industry, despite great strides in reducing design time, they are still measured in years.  In the aircraft carrier business, it can take 16 years to develop a new fleet.

Modular outsourcing, while great in theory, is tough in the real world.  It demands a new way of thinking, designing and working together with your supplier network.

Tip #1 – Simplify your product architecture first. Modular outsourcing begins with complexity reduction.  It requires an “open systems architecture,” the ability to integrate or “dock” components easily.

What’s first needed is a simple, clear product functional structure, how each module will work and how its functions will be integrated with all others.  Your suppliers must be able to not only see how their component interfaces with your product, but also how it interfaces with the rest of your product’s system.  The basic rule is, “Simplify functions first, modularize components later.”

Case in point: Over a decade ago we began working with automobile manufacturers on modular doors and even complete interiors.  Only now are such sub-systems being outsourced.  A major reason: the difficulty of assembling these modules to the vehicle itself.

Tip #2 – Reduce your number of product variants. Minimize the number of sub-systems, or modules.  Do this by encouraging your supplier to take responsibility for more multi-functional modules functions.  Fewer modules means fewer interfaces.  Fewer interfaces means less opportunity for total system failure.

Our recommendation: We use the Schuh Complexity Management software tool VARIANT TREE to analyze how best to reduce the number of product variants, yet still deliver customer requirements.  This tool is proving highly successful in the European auto industry.

Tip #3 – Build long-term partnership alliances early. Modular outsourcing requires far closer cooperation than traditional supplier relationships.  Your partner must clearly understand your total product strategy, as well as your product system architecture.  Since design will drive the major part of outsourcing success, his design teams must be interfacing with yours right from the start.

Remember: You will be designing not only a new product, you will be also designing a new logistics system.  A key benefit of modular outsourcing is the chance to simplify the complexity of your logistics chain;.  In short, you will be working on the total “end-to-end” process from concept to final customer.  Your supplier’s design teams must also be able to interface with other modular sub-system suppliers.

All of this means a high level of trust and complete understanding about mutual goals, something which does not come about overnight.

Essential: Get your potential supplier partners involved in your new modular design’s conceptual stage.  This is where the greatest gains can be made.  Begin by designing the process of how your teams will interface, how your teams will work together, before you begin on mutually designing the new product.  In modular outsourcing, team process drives design success.

Tip #4 – Require multi-generation conceptual designs. All products begin to erode competitively the day they are launched (some even before they are launched!)  They are attacked by what we call the “three sharks of constant change”: Technology, competition and changing customer requirements.  What you are looking for are module supplier partners who understand these forces and are anticipating them with constant design improvements.

Ask your supplier to demonstrate how his design teams track each of these “three sharks” and how they are developing future product generations to deal with them.  This is important as in modular outsourcing the supplier can take major responsibility for product improvement.

Suggestion: We show module suppliers how to simultaneously develop their new sub-systems in three generations, what we call “step-stretch-leap.” The “step” generation is the next one to reach the marketplace.  The “stretch” generation is the one that follows and the “leap” generation is design of the far future.  Discussing these conceptual designs among design teams helps to clarify product strategy and, very importantly, surface misconceptions and possible system conflicts.

This is the way we work with aircraft carrier designers who must anticipate weapons system changes years in advance.  We also use the same process with Microsoft designers who are at the other end of the product life cycle spectrum.

Modularity can pay big dividends.  But don’t expect the trip to be painless.  It also carries a lot of front-end investment and a tough learning curve.